Ohio State engineers have developed a radar system that is virtually undetectable, and because it involves using random noise, the development may have a future in many aspects of life around us.
Eric Walton, a senior research scientist in the ElectroScience Laboratory, said that he has used versions of the technology to track humans inside a building, find land mines, locate buried pipes and find humans walking in foliage.
Walton says the technology could be utilized by law enforcement to measure vehicle speed undetected, the military, disaster rescue and, with more development, medical imaging
The new system scatters a very low-intensity signal across a wide range of frequencies, so a TV or radio tuned to any one frequency would interpret the radar signal as a very weak form of static.
“Almost all radio receivers in the world are designed to eliminate random noise, so that they can clearly receive the signal they’re looking for,” Walton said in a press release. “Radio receivers could search for this radar signal and they wouldn’t find it. It also won’t interfere with TV, radio or other communication signals.”
Like traditional radar, the “noise” radar detects objects by bouncing a radio signal off them and detecting the return. The difference is the noise a radar generates is a signal that resembles random noise, and a computer calculates very small differences in the return signal. The calculations happen billions of times every second, and the pattern of the signal changes constantly, so a receiver could not detect the signal unless it knew to look for a specific pattern.
“It doesn’t interfere because it has a bandwidth that is thousands of times broader than the signals it might otherwise interfere with,” Walton said in a press release.
The radar can also penetrate through walls, which is why it can be used in the military to scan for enemy soldiers inside buildings without being detected, Walton said.
The technology can also be used in disaster relief to help to locate survivors pinned under rubble. Walton said the radar locates humans by the movements they make or how they move, breathing, heart beats – all the unconscious motions that a human’s body makes.
Traditional technology cannot detect these survivors because they look too far away, they cannot see things only a few feet away. According to Walton, the new radar is able to detect objects clearly only a few feet away.
“It can see things that are only a couple of inches away with as much clarity as it can see things on the surface of Mars,” he said in a press release.
With some development, the technology may be used to image tumors, blood clots and foreign objects in the body and measure bone density. Researchers must first, however, determine the radars effect on the human body.
OSU is expected to patent the technology shortly.
